Profiles - March 1994

The 15,000-square-foot facility in Vista, Calif., is like a Steven Spielberg special-effect studio. Thirty-three employees are hard at work, using grinding wheels, glue guns and non-traditional cooking utensils to achieve perfection: perfect looking food.

Fax Foods founded by Francesco Dorigo, a former NASA engineer in 1989, has garnered a reputation among restaurants, supermarkets and other food purveyors around the world by manufacturing fake food. Such blue-chip clients as Wal-Mart and Shoney's Family Restaurants use Fax Foods to create fresh-looking display products all the time-without worrying about chocolates melting, bananas turning brown or lettuce wilting.

So realistic are Fax (as in facsimile) Foods products, in fact, that one health inspector nearly dinged Dorigo for improper food preparation because he saw rows of multilayered submarine sandwiches exposed to the open air on a summer day. "Hey, they're not real," Dorigo told the embarrassed inspector. Dorigo's art does look good enough to eat.

"That's the point," says the 39-year-old inventor who studied culinary arts in Switzerland and worked as a chef in Germany before becoming an engineer. But when the soft-spoken Italian immigrant found that, on his NASA salary, he couldn't pay his mortgage at the end of every month, Dorigo decided to combine his calling with his training. His break came five years ago when he made a trophy for a friend: plastic corn-on-the-cob mounted on a plaque. It looked so realistic that word of his talents spread, and business started popping up everywhere. And Dorigo went from rocket scientist to food simulator.

"The most important part is the mold, " says Dorigo, who favors a cobbler's apron over the traditional chef's garb.

Customers send everything from cotton candy to hanging salami by air express so that the team at Fax Foods can create the perfect mold, which is then filled with non-toxic liquid plastic, cured in microwave ovens, colored and assembled.

Creating one of these culinary works of art is by no means a piece of cake: Dorigo says he often has to explain the process to some customers, who, imagining their order will take as much time to make as the real thing, demand fast-food-like service.

Fax Foods' success translated into more than $1 million in sales last year-nearly double the company's business in 1992, according to Dorigo. And the future looks even better: A recent market study showed a rising demand for replica foods.

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